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This French/Israeli co-production stars Tom Mercier , who here makes his film debut. The young man cuts a startling figure. A performer seemingly without a lot of inhibition, he gives his character Yoav a swagger no matter what his condition. Naked and cold, or dressed in a ridiculously colored topcoat, droopy-eyed and with a mouth that’s a permanent sultry hangdog pout, Yoav looks like he’s about to get in your face even in distancing long shot.

Apparently the character is a surrogate for the movie’s writer/director Nadiv Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker who experienced an identity crisis in his younger years. In “Synonyms,” Yoav, traumatized by a stint in the IDF and fed up with his country’s cruelty and hypocrisy—the movie’s title refers to all the French words Yoav learns to characterize his awful homeland—he arrives in Paris determined to wipe his religious and national identity clean and experience rebirth. In the opening he does just that, metaphorically. Disoriented, he enters an empty apartment and gives himself a bath; he emerges to find his clothes and backpack stolen. What, a metaphor? Certainly. The movie ends with a character banging on a door that’s permanently barred to them. It’s that kind of movie.

Yoav is rescued by a young, comfortable couple in the apartment above the one he bathed in. Emile ( Quentin Dolmaire ) and Caroline, aka “Lo,” are intelligent, secure, and settled. Such is this movies "art film overdetermination" that you know that Yoav is going to sleep with at least one of them. (And when the deed is indeed broached, the one says, “I’ve known this was going to happen since the first time I laid eyes on you,” what do you know.) They help him out, and he finds a wreck of a flat of his own, and, despite his wanting to renounce his ties to Israel, he finds himself hanging out with countrymen of his who wear black jackets and white shirts and do “security.” In his adventures he meets a photographer who subjects him to verbal abuse during a pornographic shoot, he rejects calls from a former girlfriend and physical visits from relatives, and kicks around speechifying and recollecting that traumatic time in the IDF. He’s asked why come to France when so many Jews are leaving France, and doesn’t have much of an answer.

“Synonyms” touches on a lot of themes, including that of The Jewish Disruptor, one which the American author Philip Roth got a lot out of. The fugitive echoes of Roth also bring to mind French director Arnaud Deplechin, who draws a lot from Roth (literally—one of the monologues in his great “ Kings and Queen ” derives from Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater ) and the variety of visual approaches here, not to mention the overall frank attitude, sometimes make “Synonyms” come off like Junior Varsity Arnaud.

But the movie is, for all its accomplishments, sketchy, tentative. And there’s something about the conception of Yoav that smacks of self-aggrandizement. He’s a rude Candide, with some of the brutishness that Adam Driver brought to his grunty, deliberately non-articulate “Girls” character. He’s macho in a world that’s ever so slowly renouncing that quality, and he’s not in the least interested in adjustment. While that makes for a striking character within the frame for most of the movie’s running time, a climactic scene in which he upbraids a group of chamber musicians reveals the heart of dumbness that invariably animates such characters.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Synonyms (2019)

123 minutes

Tom Mercier as Yoav

Louise Chevillotte as Caroline

Quentin Dolmaire as Emile

• Nadav Lapid

Director of Photography

• Shai Goldman
• François Gédigier
• Netalie Braun

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Review: Nadav Lapid’s ‘Synonyms’ is a brilliant, corrosive portrait of a man without a country

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The opening moments of Nadav Lapid’s “Synonyms” have a sinister, almost Kafka-esque absurdity. Yoav (Tom Mercier), a young man who has forsaken his Israeli identity for a French one, wraps himself in a sleeping bag and hops along the floor of the vacant Paris apartment where he’s temporarily staying. When he gets to the bathroom, he wriggles out of the bag and hops into the tub, as though he were shedding a cocoon.

But after his bath, Yoav finds that all his possessions have mysteriously vanished, leaving him shivering and naked as he dashes from one apartment to the next, knocking on doors and crying for help.

Help arrives in the form of a neighboring young couple, Émile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who find Yoav passed out in the tub, carry him into their apartment and bundle him in blankets. They’re unfazed by this visitor’s sudden arrival, and their unconcealed curiosity, as well as their flirtation with a certain cheeky-worldly French stereotype, may make you wonder if the movie is about to take a polyamorous turn.

But there is more than prurience in their gaze, and in the movie’s. Lapid, his camera magnetized by the human body whether in motion or at rest, confronts you with Yoav’s nakedness early and often. He wants to familiarize you with it, until it has transformed from one thing, an object of potential art-house titillation, into something more resonant and ambiguous. Yoav’s nude body becomes a kind of metaphorical conflict zone, his circumcised penis an eternal reminder that identity cannot always be cast off like a carapace, no matter how hard you might try.

And, oh, how Yoav tries and tries throughout “Synonyms,” a searing, maddening, explosively brainy movie about the mutability and immutability of the self that, appropriately enough, never stops changing shape. This wildly unpredictable picture, winner of the top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (full disclosure: I was on the jury), is the third feature from the 44-year-old Lapid, whose earlier “Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher” announced him as an unusually fearless and provocative social critic among Israeli filmmakers.

Following a character abroad for the first time, Lapid has made a corrosive portrait of a man who rejects his homeland, forbidding himself to speak Hebrew and hurling himself into the French language. But total immersion doesn’t mean an easy transformation, and “Synonyms,” awash in Greek mythology, Hebrew poetry and French adjectives, swiftly morphs into a wrenching, fiercely funny drama of cultural estrangement. The man in question is a version of Lapid himself, who drew elements of the story from his own experience. Rather than feigning a seamless merging of his actual and fictional selves, he builds that tension right into the movie’s surface, making it manifest in formal terms.

And so while most scenes are precisely shot and composed, observing Yoav from a thoughtful remove, at certain points, the movie suddenly leaps into a handheld frenzy, as though trying to approximate his point of view. The camera swoops and darts restlessly about as Yoav makes his way down the street and along the Seine, practicing his stilted, lovely French and learning new words from a pocket dictionary.

Later, when he dances in a club packed with revelers, the widescreen frame seems unable to contain their collective exhilaration. (The cinematography is by Shai Goldman; the editing is by François Gédigier, Neta Braun and Era Lapid, the director’s mother, who died in 2018.)

This mercurial visual style makes a strange sense for a character torn between warring aspects of his history and identity, between the possibilities of his new home and the trauma and disillusionment of his past. We see that past emerge in jagged, absurdist flashbacks to his time as an Israeli soldier. We also see it seep into the present when he reluctantly takes a security job at the Israeli consulate in Paris, where he meets a colleague, Yaron (Uri Hayik), who is his proudly Jewish antithesis.

Lapid extracts some arresting physical comedy here, all in service of a scalding satirical vision. An office wrestling match between two other security workers becomes a hilarious sendup of Israeli militarism, dripping with performative machismo. A sequence in which Yoav rebels at work, letting a long line of visitors into the consulate, offers a funny, thrillingly suggestive vision of barriers being cast aside.

But your laughter may swell and die in your throat when a cash-strapped Yoav debases himself for a pornographer (Christophe Paou) who has a particular fixation on the young man’s Jewishness. The cringe-inducing spectacle that follows reduces Yoav to a tawdry symbol and tramples his conflicted, complicated humanity.

Mercier’s performance, for its part, invites any number of contradictory readings. A trained dancer and martial artist, he acts with a ferocious physicality, alternating between robotic stiffness and lightning-quick grace, between defensiveness and confrontation. Yoav is a blank slate, a canvas onto which the audience can project its fantasies, assumptions and ideas. (The lack of baggage from earlier screen roles helps; astonishingly, this is Mercier’s screen debut.) Émile helps Yoav dress up that canvas, clothing him in the attire of a chic, culturally assimilated Frenchman; his signature item is a golden overcoat so striking that it almost becomes another character.

But clothes don’t make the man, and Yoav’s identity remains a construct of mind and flesh. He cannot change his body, but he can alter his language, and so he keeps feverishly practicing his French, attacking each new word with violent purpose. His insult vocabulary balloons overnight: As he tells Émile, he abandoned Israel because it is “nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant, detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted.” To which Émile diplomatically replies, “No country is all that at once.”

Maybe not. But Yoav’s tragedy, one suggested by the title of “Synonyms” itself, is that one country may not be quite so different from another. Émile, an aspiring writer, and Caroline, an oboist, are, at once, generous and exploitative; they are friendly strangers and also smirking caricatures of France’s cultured class. And the strange, unpredictable, quasi-romantic triangle that binds them to Yoav becomes a kind of metaphor for the fraught, complex allyship between France and Israel. Lapid pushes the comparisons to the breaking point, never more so than when he lets us hear some especially bloodthirsty snippets from “La Marseillaise.” In that moment we realize that Yoav is more lost than ever, a man whose conscience has left him without a country.

In French and Hebrew with English subtitles Not rated Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes Playing: Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles

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Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms Is a Dream, Then a Dance, Then an Existential Threat

In the opening scenes of Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms , Yoav (Tom Mercier), a young Israeli man who has just arrived in France without a penny to his name, wakes up in the mysteriously empty, spacious building where he’s camped out for the night, goes into the shower, and briefly jerks off. Stepping out of the bathroom, he finds that his clothes have been taken (we never find out by whom) and he runs, naked and frantic, among the building’s many bare rooms looking for them, gradually getting colder, until he seems ready to freeze. It’s a situation that starts off as a joke, then transforms into an anxiety dream, then a dance — there’s a tight, performative grace to Mercier’s movements — and then an existential threat— Yoav winds up back in the bathtub, desperately rubbing his arms and legs trying to get warm — before landing in the realm of metaphor. The young man has found himself naked and alone and possessionless in a strange new land, at the mercy of the very air around him, unable to hide.

He’s also, it seems, ripe for reinvention. When the posh French couple that lives upstairs, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), discover Yoav, they give him Emile’s clothes. For the young man, who hopes never to see Israel again, and who refuses even to speak Hebrew anymore, it feels like a new beginning, especially since Emile’s clothes make him feel like a dandy, or maybe even royalty. But right from the beginning, there’s a slightly sexual edge to the Parisian duo’s interest in Yoav; Emile notes that he’s uncircumcised. Later, Yoav will find that his body is an endless source of fascination for those around him, including a pornographer who wants to put him in a sexual scenario with an Arab woman.

Throughout, there remains an air of trauma around Yoav. He has stories — vague ones — about his life and his disturbing experiences in the Israeli military, and we sense his rage and desire to break free. The idea of death is never far: When he first wakes up and sees Emile and Caroline, he asks, “Is this death?” When they give him a plastic bag, he refers to it as “a bag for cadavers.” Stalking the streets, tensely reciting French words and phrases to himself, his head down in concentration and maybe fear, his thoughts keep turning to violence, repression, cruelty, humiliation. He recalls his admiration as a child for Hector, the legendary warrior of Troy. He then remembers that his parents refused to tell him what happened to Hector; promises of military glory rarely acknowledge the gross murder that is its constant companion. A flash image of a man’s body being dragged — much as Hector’s was — from the back of a van at night, along a slick, busy street in Israel, hints at the horrors that crowd the young Yoav’s mind, though we have no idea if this represents a memory, a projection, or a nightmare.

Synonyms is based loosely on Lapid’s own experiences, when, in his early 20s, not long after completing his military service, he fled to France. “Attaching my future to Israel would be a disaster,” he recalled thinking, in a 2014 Bomb Magazine interview . “I wanted my life to revolve around the sky, trees, love, sex, human nature, and not whether or not to have a peace contract with the Palestinians, whether to give them Gaza, and so on … I felt strangled by this place.” Much like Synonyms ’ protagonist, Lapid himself swore not to speak Hebrew, and wandered the streets with a French dictionary. And, much like other exiles before him, he discovered an inconvenient fact: “I’ve never felt myself so Israeli as when I was in Paris,” he says in that same interview.

For all this raw sense of darkness, Synonyms ’ narrative is somewhat elliptical, its tone hovering between bemused and deadpan. Characters sometimes speak in non sequiturs, break into dances, or start fights. Lapid’s framing is achingly precise, except when it’s not; whenever Yoav goes for his head-down walks, the camera drifts feverishly along streets and among feet, assuming his point of view. (When the young man finally looks up, he sees Notre-Dame.)

But for all the artful obliqueness of Lapid’s approach, the autobiographical background of the story lends it a lived-in honesty; the incidents and interactions of Synonyms feel both symbolic and true. One could compare the picture to Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s similarly excellent — though far more absurdist — It Must Be Heaven , a comedy about exile in which the filmmaker flees Bethlehem for Europe and America, only to discover that the whole world has effectively become Palestine. Something similar happens to Yoav: He takes a French class and recites the French national anthem, with its references to a land being soaked in the blood of the impure; aggression and death and fear and violence are everywhere, for those attuned to them.

When Yoav falls in with a group of macho security workers at the Israeli embassy, it might at first seem odd that a guy seeking to start a new life might hang out with people who would remind him of his past. It might also seem odd that he’d become fast friends with Yaron (Uria Hayik), a tough-minded, somewhat delusional colleague who’s the flipside of Yoav. Instead of hiding his identity, Yaron tells everybody he meets that he’s Jewish, and from Israel, right away; he also fantasizes about how he might have stopped various terrorist attacks in France. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Yaron slaps a yarmulke on his head in the subway and hums the Israeli national anthem while stomping around, staring directly into passengers’ faces. They turn away from him so quietly and with so little outward puzzlement that I wondered if this was meant to be a bizarre dream sequence, until I realized that this is probably what I’d do too if some random guy on a subway started staring at me and singing “Hatikvah.” That’s part of the beauty of this film: It games out very real, very human impulses to their surreal breaking points, only to uncover even greater truths.

Yaron might be Yoav’s diametrical opposite, but in truth, the two men represent something fundamental. Yoav is unable to discard his identity, because it’s more than an identity — it is a self; the very fact that he wants so desperately to shed it means that he cannot. The film is built around this inescapability, both narratively and formally: All its ellipses and repetitions, its shifts in style and tone, its raw fascination with bodies and movement, circle around this sense of cognitive, corporeal entrapment. Our sense of being in the world is life’s most infernal chicken-and-egg question. What came first, the person or the persona?

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Breaking news, trump found guilty of all 34 counts in hush money case, ‘synonyms’ (‘synonymes’): film review | berlin 2019.

Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid’s third feature, 'Synonyms,' stars newcomer Tom Mercier as an expat trying to emancipate himself in Paris.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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Ever since A Moveable Feast and probably way before that, the expat-in-Paris story became a genre unto itself, yielding hundreds of novels and memoirs — and more recently, blogs, Instagram accounts and lifestyle bestsellers — as well as a handful of memorable films over the past half-century: An American in Paris , Charade , Frantic , Before Sunset , The Dreamers and Midnight in Paris , to name a few.

Yet the genre is not an easy one to tackle without hopelessly tumbling into a Seine full of clichés, so maverick Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid deserves credit for making his third feature, Synonyms ( Synonymes ), such a unique and bristling take on the Paris experience.

Far from the usual rosy hymns to the City of Light, this tale of a former IDF soldier trying to learn French and make a new life for himself — or rather, escape the life he led back home in Israel — is a fervid first-person chronicle centered around the volatile performance of newcomer Tom Mercier, who delivers a raw, disconcerting and altogether unpredictable turn that recalls the work of a young Tom Hardy (this includes his ability to act without any clothes on).

But Synonyms can also be a demanding film to sit through at times, especially during a second half that lacks the intensity of the opening segments. Lapid’s two excellent previous features, Policeman and The Kindergarten Teacher , were marked by an underlying tension from start to finish, as if the director pulled the pin out of a hand grenade and then held the lever down for the entire movie. Here, that bomb gradually gets diffused through a digressive plot and overlong running time, even if on an aesthetic and thematic level Lapid continues to surprise. After premiering in competition at the Berlinale, his latest should see more fest play and limited art-house action abroad.

When we first meet twenty-something Yoav, he’s made his way to a magnificent vacant apartment in the heart of Paris’ hoity-toity Left Bank. With only a backpack to his name, Yoav wakes up in the buff (in one of a few full-frontal nude scenes) in the early morning hours and takes a shower to try and warm up. When he gets out, he realizes someone has stolen his bag, after which he passes out from the cold and the shock. He may in fact be dead.

But he awakes a while later — born again, in a sense — at the home of a young and chic neighboring couple: the gentle wannabe writer, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and his musician girlfriend, Caroline (Louise Chevillotte). The two, who have money to burn and artistic ambitions to flame, quickly take Yoav under their wing. They give him some of Emile’s clothes (including an uber-stylish overcoat he wears throughout the movie), listening as he shares his thoughts and army stories in his very special brand of French.

Indeed, Yoav’s maniacal relationship with la langue française is one of the more striking aspects of Synonyms , whose title refers to its hero’s obsessive way of studying the French dictionary and repeating words aloud, like a rabid exchange student let loose upon the streets. Walking with his head down and his hands in his pockets, Yoav mumbles his way through the city while refusing to acknowledge its touristy splendor. He wants to experience Paris on his own terms, which seem to involve a complete immersion into the language and a total separation from his own identity.

But Yoav’s homeland is never far behind, especially when he gets a security job at the Israeli consulate that leads to a run-in with a few hot-headed compatriots poised for a fight. This brings out a side of Yoav that he clearly tried to bury by running away to a land of art, literature and extreme culture. Yet no matter how much he tries to speak in the refined words of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, while only once using his native Hebrew, Yoav cannot seem to tame the beast he harbors within.

Much of this is conveyed through Mercier’s unrelenting physical presence, which borders on explosive though never descends into outright violence. The actor, who was a theater student in Israel when Lapid discovered him, is both fascinating and slightly terrifying to watch. You never know if Yoav is going to launch into a long and verbose personal monologue or punch you right in the face. Or, like he does in one scene, leap up on a table and do a striptease to Technotronic’s club anthem “Pump Up the Jam.”

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That sequence is one of several memorable set-pieces in a film that ultimately works better in parts than it does as a whole. Other standout moments include an intimate scene where Yoav and Emile listen to classical music and nearly fall into an embrace; a punishing photo séance where Yoav models nude for a perverse artist; and a surreal classroom sequence where a jingoistic professor (Lea Drucker) expounds the glories of France to a bunch of unsuspecting foreigners, culminating with Yoav reciting “La Marseillaise.”

What’s interesting about that last scene is how well it illustrates Yoav’s impossible predicament: He’s done everything he can to flee the militaristic climate of Israel (glimpsed in a few surreal flashbacks), only to wind up spouting the blood-thirsty lyrics of the French national anthem. Like many expat stories, Synonyms reveals the futility of moving abroad to get away from oneself, and the real fight Yoav wages is against his own demons. Yet the story can also feel drawn out and discursive, with a few plotlines (such as that involving the Israeli thugs) never really finding fruition, and a three-way love triangle between Yoav, Emile and Caroline that feels a tad too flat and familiar.

This doesn’t mean the filmmaking is anything short of arresting in places, especially for the first half of the movie, and Lapid continues to exhibit a singular blend of intensity and absurdity, as well as a distinct attention to cinematic craft. Working once again with lenser Shai Goldman, he covers entire scenes in lengthy medium close-ups that serve to heighten the constant sense of claustrophobia, pushing the characters (and the viewer) to the breaking point. These sequences are intercut with extremely subjective, handheld POVs of Yoav wandering the streets of Paris but refusing to look up and take in the city’s many pleasures. All he can seem to feel is its pain.   

Production company: SBS Films Cast: Tom Mercier, Quentin Dolmaire, Louise Chevillotte Director: Nadav Lapid Screenwriters: Nadav Lapid, Haim Lapid Producers: Said Ben Said, Michel Merkt Director of photography: Shai Goldman Production designer: Pascale Consigny Costume designer: Khadija Zeggai Editors: Era Lapid, Neta Braun Casting directors: Stephane Batut, Orit Zulay Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition) Sales: SBS Internaitonal

In French, Hebrew, English 123 minutes

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Film Review: ‘Synonyms’

Exceptional newcomer Tom Mercier plays an ex-Israeli soldier desperate to ditch his national identification who moves to Paris in Nadav Lapid's latest.

By Jay Weissberg

Jay Weissberg

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Nadav Lapid ’s two previous films have all had elements of autobiography and political critique, but neither framed those traits in a vehicle as deliriously unpredictable and enthrallingly impenetrable as “ Synonyms .” Breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning all but impossible to grasp in full measure, the film is an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this astonishingly audacious debut. Based partly on Lapid’s own past as an Israeli who moved to Paris and refused to speak Hebrew, this uncategorizable cinematic trip will polarize critics and audiences alike, with some reading it as indulgent, disjointed excess and others admiring the sheer fearlessness of it all.

Among those most likely to be scandalized, the nationalists controlling Israel’s Ministry of Culture may be surprised to discover that a movie they helped fund is so clearly taking a Kalashnikov to the nation’s military culture and its carefully nurtured persecution complex. Given the body’s penchant for propagandizing against anything they deem anti-Israeli (their campaign against “Foxtrot” is a prime example), it’s likely “Synonyms” will need to cleverly leverage all the publicity, pro and con, to nab international distribution deals.

Typecasting Israelis and Parisians alike, the film demands multilevel readings, forcing viewers to question the nature of stereotypes and their validity outside parody. The world is a frenetic blur for Yoav (Mercier), just arrived in Paris and closely trailed by a camera that bounces with every arm-swing and footfall. Visual calm arrives once he enters a large empty apartment in an upscale neighborhood; he goes to sleep in a sleeping bag, but on waking, discovers that his backpack, and then his sleeping bag, are gone. His calls to the neighbors go unheeded, and naked and freezing, he passes out in the bathtub, where Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) find him.

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The pair are a caricature of a cute French couple: He’s philosophical and sexually ambiguous, writing a book he’ll likely never finish called “Night of Inertia.” She’s sensual, chic, and plays the oboe. They take Yoav into their apartment, where Emile gives him clothes, a cell phone and hundreds of euros; in exchange, Yoav gives him his lip-piercing ring before heading across the river and a shabby apartment where he’s now crashing. Though just learning French, Yoav’s words tumble out of his mouth in a flood of descriptive terms and cascades of synonyms, like a man pathologically driven to drown himself in this new culture.

“I moved to France to flee Israel,” he tells Emile, using words like “abominable,” “mean-spirited,” and “crude” to describe his homeland. He gets a job at the Israeli consulate but won’t speak Hebrew, making him the opposite of Yaron (Uri Hayik), an intelligence agent convinced that Europe is a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitism, and France its nucleus. Where Yoav wants to be French, Yaron antagonistically confronts everyone with his Israeli-ness, bellowing, “I’m Jewish!” at strangers and aggressively humming the Israeli national anthem in the faces of metro passengers. It’s the sort of hepped-up machismo Lapid mesmerizingly used in “Policeman,” here directed at a world constantly portrayed as the enemy of the Jewish State.

Insight into Yoav’s compulsive need to rid himself of his nationality comes in pieces, first through his obsession with the legendary Trojan figure of Hector, a warrior whose fate as the losing champion of his nation makes him, for Israelis unable to accept even the possibility of defeat, the ultimate failure of a man. Then there are glimpses of his life as a soldier in Israel, absurdist vignettes such as when he perforates a shooting-range dummy by discharging his machine gun to the rhythm of Pink Martini’s Frencher-than-French-fries song, “Je ne veux pas travailler.” Or the time he was awarded a silver medal and two fellow soldiers perform the sickly-sweet, insidiously catchy Eurovision Song Contest winner “Hallelujah La Olam.”

This juxtaposition of ersatz French and exaggerated Israeli sensibilities creates a tension that threatens to overwhelm (and potentially annoy) viewers not in sync with Lapid’s devil-may-care vision. Those willing to go along with the numerous twists and turns arrive toward the end with the revelatory comparison in a cultural assimilation class between the bloodthirsty lyrics of “La Marseillaise” and the insistent Zionism of the Israeli anthem “HaTikvah,” the former an antiquated battle cry full of gore, the latter a hopeful paean that skirts over the country’s toxic militarism. The final image, of Yoav slamming his body against a locked door that won’t budge, is ripe with significance, most powerfully, the inability to escape one’s heritage.

In an interview, Lapid says that Mercier’s audition was a shocking experience, and given what the actor does on screen, it’s not a surprise. Fearlessly tackling a role that requires a bewildering level of physicality, the newcomer quite literally throws himself into scenes of explosive energy. Even were he not seen naked, as he frequently is, Mercier has a body language and presence that treats clothes as a superfluity, and his ability to run with French, a language not his own, is deeply impressive (even though the script overdoes his occasional hesitations, especially on words far easier than some others he never trips over). Dolmaire, best known for Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days,” is the very model of the insouciant young Parisian, intellectual and nerdishly sexy; Chevillotte’s Caroline is suitably lovely yet her role is the least developed.

Shaï Goldman, who also shot “Policeman,” reflects Yoav’s swings with edgy camerawork, wildly unstable one moment, calm and voyeuristically observational in others, such as when a porn photographer has Yoav lie on the floor, legs elevated, making him penetrate himself while shouting in Hebrew. It’s the character’s breaking point: Objectified by the French he so wants to become, desperate to rid himself of the psychological damage he’s accumulated, Yoav is pressed between two cultures, embodying the eternally self-aware outsider.

Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 12, 2018. Running time: 123 MIN. (Original title: ‘Synonymes’)

• Production: (France-Israel-Germany) An SBS Productions, Pie Films, Komplizen Film, Arte France Cinéma prod., with the participation of ARTE France, ARTW/WDR, CNC, German Federal Film Board. (Int'l sales: SBS Int'l, Paris.) Producers: Saïd Ben Saïd, Michel Merkt. Co-producers: Osnat Handelsman Keren, Talia Kleinhendler, Janine Jackowski, Jonas Dornbach, Maren Ade.
• Crew: Director: Nadav Lapid. Screenplay: Lapid, Haïm Lapid. Camera (color, widescreen): Shaï Goldman. Editors: Era Lapid, François Gédigier, Neta Braun.
• With: Tom Mercier, Quentin Dolmaire, Louise Chevillotte , Uri Hayik, Léa Drucker. (French, Hebrew, English dialogue)

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Review: ‘Synonyms’ is a brilliant, corrosive portrait of a man without a country

An israeli in paris undergoes a strange, thrillingly unpredictable identity crisis in nadav lapid’s prize-winning third feature.

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The opening moments of Nadav Lapid’s “Synonyms” have a sinister, almost Kafka-esque absurdity. Yoav (Tom Mercier), a young man who has forsaken his Israeli identity for a French one, wraps himself in a sleeping bag and hops along the floor of the vacant Paris apartment where he’s temporarily staying. When he gets to the bathroom, he wriggles out of the bag and hops into the tub, as though he were shedding a cocoon.

But after his bath, Yoav finds that all his possessions have mysteriously vanished, leaving him shivering and naked as he dashes from one apartment to the next, knocking on doors and crying for help.

Help arrives in the form of a neighboring young couple, Émile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who find Yoav passed out in the tub, carry him into their apartment and bundle him in blankets. They’re unfazed by this visitor’s sudden arrival, and their unconcealed curiosity, as well as their flirtation with a certain cheeky-worldly French stereotype, may make you wonder if the movie is about to take a polyamorous turn.

But there is more than prurience in their gaze, and in the movie’s. Lapid, his camera magnetized by the human body whether in motion or at rest, confronts you with Yoav’s nakedness early and often. He wants to familiarize you with it, until it has transformed from one thing, an object of potential art-house titillation, into something more resonant and ambiguous. Yoav’s nude body becomes a kind of metaphorical conflict zone, his circumcised penis an eternal reminder that identity cannot always be cast off like a carapace, no matter how hard you might try.

And, oh, how Yoav tries and tries throughout “Synonyms,” a searing, maddening, explosively brainy movie about the mutability and immutability of the self that, appropriately enough, never stops changing shape. This wildly unpredictable picture, winner of the top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (full disclosure: I was on the jury), is the third feature from the 44-year-old Lapid, whose earlier “Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher” announced him as an unusually fearless and provocative social critic among Israeli filmmakers.

Following a character abroad for the first time, Lapid has made a corrosive portrait of a man who rejects his homeland, forbidding himself to speak Hebrew and hurling himself into the French language. But total immersion doesn’t mean an easy transformation, and “Synonyms,” awash in Greek mythology, Hebrew poetry and French adjectives, swiftly morphs into a wrenching, fiercely funny drama of cultural estrangement. The man in question is a version of Lapid himself, who drew elements of the story from his own experience. Rather than feigning a seamless merging of his actual and fictional selves, he builds that tension right into the movie’s surface, making it manifest in formal terms.

And so while most scenes are precisely shot and composed, observing Yoav from a thoughtful remove, at certain points, the movie suddenly leaps into a handheld frenzy, as though trying to approximate his point of view. The camera swoops and darts restlessly about as Yoav makes his way down the street and along the Seine, practicing his stilted, lovely French and learning new words from a pocket dictionary.

Later, when he dances in a club packed with revelers, the widescreen frame seems unable to contain their collective exhilaration. (The cinematography is by Shai Goldman; the editing is by François Gédigier, Neta Braun and Era Lapid, the director’s mother, who died in 2018.)

This mercurial visual style makes a strange sense for a character torn between warring aspects of his history and identity, between the possibilities of his new home and the trauma and disillusionment of his past. We see that past emerge in jagged, absurdist flashbacks to his time as an Israeli soldier. We also see it seep into the present when he reluctantly takes a security job at the Israeli consulate in Paris, where he meets a colleague, Yaron (Uri Hayik), who is his proudly Jewish antithesis.

Lapid extracts some arresting physical comedy here, all in service of a scalding satirical vision. An office wrestling match between two other security workers becomes a hilarious sendup of Israeli militarism, dripping with performative machismo. A sequence in which Yoav rebels at work, letting a long line of visitors into the consulate, offers a funny, thrillingly suggestive vision of barriers being cast aside.

But your laughter may swell and die in your throat when a cash-strapped Yoav debases himself for a pornographer (Christophe Paou) who has a particular fixation on the young man’s Jewishness. The cringe-inducing spectacle that follows reduces Yoav to a tawdry symbol and tramples his conflicted, complicated humanity.

Mercier’s performance, for its part, invites any number of contradictory readings. A trained dancer and martial artist, he acts with a ferocious physicality, alternating between robotic stiffness and lightning-quick grace, between defensiveness and confrontation. Yoav is a blank slate, a canvas onto which the audience can project its fantasies, assumptions and ideas. (The lack of baggage from earlier screen roles helps; astonishingly, this is Mercier’s screen debut.) Émile helps Yoav dress up that canvas, clothing him in the attire of a chic, culturally assimilated Frenchman; his signature item is a golden overcoat so striking that it almost becomes another character.

But clothes don’t make the man, and Yoav’s identity remains a construct of mind and flesh. He cannot change his body, but he can alter his language, and so he keeps feverishly practicing his French, attacking each new word with violent purpose. His insult vocabulary balloons overnight: As he tells Émile, he abandoned Israel because it is “nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant, detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted.” To which Émile diplomatically replies, “No country is all that at once.”

Maybe not. But Yoav’s tragedy, one suggested by the title of “Synonyms” itself, is that one country may not be quite so different from another. Émile, an aspiring writer, and Caroline, an oboist, are, at once, generous and exploitative; they are friendly strangers and also smirking caricatures of France’s cultured class. And the strange, unpredictable, quasi-romantic triangle that binds them to Yoav becomes a kind of metaphor for the fraught, complex allyship between France and Israel. Lapid pushes the comparisons to the breaking point, never more so than when he lets us hear some especially bloodthirsty snippets from “La Marseillaise.” In that moment we realize that Yoav is more lost than ever, a man whose conscience has left him without a country.

In French and Hebrew, with English subtitles Rating: Not rated When: Opens Friday Where: Digital Gym Cinema Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes

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Where to Watch

Tom Mercier (Yoav) Quentin Dolmaire (Emile) Louise Chevillotte (Caroline) Uria Hayik (Yaron) Olivier Loustau (Michel) Yehuda Almagor (Yoav's Father) Gaya von Schwarze (Tamar) Gal Amitai (Eyal) Idan Ashkenazi (Roey) Dolev Ohana (Amit)

Nadav Lapid

A young Israeli man absconds to Paris to flee his nationality, aided by his trusty Franco-Israeli dictionary.

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More about Synonyms

Berlin winner Synonyms is a stylish but obvious fish-out-of-water allegory

Yoav (Tom Mercier), the hero of the Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid’s quizzical new film Synonyms , is not the …

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Movie Review: Synonyms (2019)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
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• --> October 30, 2019

According to award-winning Israeli director Nadav Lapid (“The Kindergarten Teacher”), “art has the right to be chaotic and wild, to go to extreme and dangerous places.” If you are looking for chaotic and wild, you need look no further than his Synonyms (Milim Nirdafot), a mystifying and often maddening film that will either leave you awestruck or looking for the nearest exit. Winner of the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI prize at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and Lapid’s first film shot outside of Israel, Synonyms is loosely based on the director’s personal experience of having left Israel for Paris after completing his mandatory military service. As he explains enigmatically, “I left Israel not because of any specific event, but due to its very existence as the embodiment and shaper of ‘Israeliness,’ at the collective Israeli soul, the DNA of being Israeli.”

Co-written by Lapid’s father Haim Lapid, the film introduces first-time actor Tom Mercier as Yoav, an Israeli ex-patriot who wants to shed his identity as a macho Israeli soldier and become immersed in French culture, one that he sees as celebrating the arts. In bondage to his heritage, Yoav carries with him the burdens of being an Israeli with its history and present day political conflicts. Paradoxically, the film does not mention the fact of the resurgence of antisemitism in France and the departure of many Jews to Israel. Ultimately, however, Yoav is no more enamored with Paris than he is with Tel Aviv, and the interchangeable synonyms he constantly repeats reflect the similarity of his experience in both cultures.

As captured by the hand-held camera of cinematographer Shai Goldman (“Doubtful”), the film opens with the view of a young man’s feet walking briskly through the streets of Paris. As he enters an old building near the River Seine and opens the door to his room, there is nothing inside but empty space — no furniture of any kind. Leaving his back pack in the middle of the floor, he does what any normal person would do in a cold and empty house. He strips naked, takes a bath and begins to masturbate until he is disturbed by sounds coming from the next room. Jumping out of the bath naked, he discovers that he has been robbed of all his possessions and frenetically runs through the building knocking on doors for help but to no avail, a suggestion perhaps that Paris will not be as welcoming as he thought.

With nothing left to do to protect himself from the cold, he gets back into the tub in a state of hypothermia and awaits redemption or death whichever comes first. Yoav is jostled back to life the next morning, however, by two young neighbors, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire, “ My Golden Days ”), the son of a wealthy entrepreneur and a would-be writer and his partner Caroline (Louise Chevillotte, “Lover for a Day”), an accomplished oboist, poster children for the French bourgeoisie. Though Yoav is a total stranger, Emile gives him the clothes and financial support he needs to keep going.

Refusing even to speak Hebrew, Yoav is repelled by Israel calling it “evil, despicable, disgusting, odorous,” among other choice adjectives he learned from his pocket-sized French dictionary. He does not even smile when Emile tells him that, “No country can be all of those things at once.” Possibly suffering from PTSD, Yoav is disillusioned about what he believes to be his country’s obsession with security and takes his anger out on his own body, freezing it, starving it, and prostituting it.

According to Lapid, Yoav is “banging his head against a wall called Israel. But it’s also because he is banging his head against himself.” His diet consists of the same dish every day, a plate of spaghetti with crushed tomatoes, the cheapest meal possible. He advertises for work as a model, but has to endure abuse at the hands of the “artist,” the only one who answers his ad. He is fired from his job as a security agent for the Israeli consulate when he takes pity on a lineup of immigrant applicants who are waiting in the pouring rain. Shouting that there is “no border,” Yoav allows them to enter the embassy without being processed.

Along the way, Yoav meets some fellow Israelis, but they only serve to reinforce his preconceptions. One is tasked by the embassy to create incidents in order to confront gangs of neo-Nazis, while another aggressively hums the music to the “Hatikvah” in the face of Metro travelers interested only in getting home after a day’s work. Though Emile is apparently sexually attracted to Yoav, he does not act on his impulses but, instead, helps him in his desire to become a French citizen by arranging a marriage to Caroline.

In the citizenship class, Yoav has to sing “La Marseillaise” as well as the Israeli national anthem in his own language, but he goes through the motions of reciting the words without feeling or commitment. Synonyms is a polarizing film which basically mirrors Lapid’s view of the Israeli army as a reflection of the nation’s damaged soul. While it lacks a coherent narrative and will test your endurance, Synonyms is a unique experience which raises important questions about the nature of our identity, our ability to come to terms with who we are, and our willingness to celebrate it.

Synonyms screened at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Tagged: Israel , nationalism , Paris , self-discovery , vancouver international film festival

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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Directed by Nadav Lapid

A young Israeli man absconds to Paris to flee his nationality, aided by his trusty Franco-Israeli dictionary.

Tom Mercier Quentin Dolmaire Louise Chevillotte Uria Hayik Olivier Loustau Yehuda Almagor Léa Drucker Gaya Von Schwarze Gal Amitai Idan Ashkenazi Dolev Ohana Liron Baranes Erwan Ribard Yawen Ribard Iman Amara-Korba Sébastien Roubinet Damien Carlet Ron Bitterman Naor Nachmani Yahalom David Herut Cohen Valentine Carette Catherine Denecy Christophe Paou Yilin Yang Jonathan Boudina

Director Director

Nadav Lapid

Producers Producers

Janine Jackowski Maren Ade Saïd Ben Saïd Jonas Dornbach Michel Merkt Talia Kleinhendler Osnat Handelsman-Keren

Writers Writers

Nadav Lapid Haim Lapid

Editors Editors

François Gédigier Era Lapid Neta Braun

Cinematography Cinematography

Shai Goldman

Sound Sound

Sandy Notarianni Christophe Vingtrinier

Pie Films Komplizen Film ARTE France Cinéma SBS Productions

Germany France Israel

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

English French Hebrew (modern)

Releases by Date

13 feb 2019, 20 mar 2019, 12 may 2019, 14 jun 2019, 14 jul 2019, 22 sep 2019, 29 sep 2019, 03 oct 2019, 04 oct 2019, 05 oct 2019, 12 oct 2019, 23 oct 2019, 09 dec 2019, 28 feb 2019, 27 mar 2019, 25 apr 2019, 16 may 2019, 05 sep 2019, 10 oct 2019, 17 oct 2019, 25 oct 2019, 14 nov 2019, 21 nov 2019, releases by country.

• Theatrical 16
• Premiere Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival
• Theatrical U
• Premiere Cabourg Film Festival
• Premiere Berlin International Film Festival
• Theatrical 12
• Premiere Athens Film Festival
• Premiere Hong Kong International Film Festival
• Premiere IndieLisboa
• Theatrical M/14

Russian Federation

• Theatrical 18+
• Theatrical 15

South Korea

• Premiere Busan International Film Festival
• Premiere New York Film Festival
• Premiere Woodstock Film Festival
• Premiere Mill Valley Film Festival
• Premiere Hamptons International Film Festival
• Premiere Milwaukee Film Festival
• Premiere Odesa International Film Festival

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Popular reviews

Review by Ben Weitz ★★★½ 9

The unresolved sexual tension between Yoav and Émile is part of the heterosexual agenda, and I will not stand for it

Review by fran hoepfner ★★★

my mans shoulda downloaded duolingo

Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 2

Nadav Lapid’s astonishing, maddening, brilliant, hilarious, obstinate, and altogether unmissable new film “Synonyms” opens with a sequence that might be described as a sideways attempt at psychic suicide. A twentysomething Israeli traveler named Yoav (extraordinary newcomer Tom Mercier) strides through the rainy streets of Paris in a shaky low-def shot that resembles paparazzi footage of a celebrity trying to leave the press behind. He storms into one of those gorgeous old buildings along the banks of the Seine, digs out the hide-a-key, and opens the door to a cold and cavernous apartment. There’s no couch, no bed, no furniture of any kind, but Yoav doesn’t seem to mind the monastic vibe; the camera relaxes into the refined grammar of contemporary…

Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★ 6

Dude totally didn't pay for that panini.

Review by k ★★½ 2

for god’s sake let’s stop making movies where male main characters have ten times the sexual tension with their close male friends than they do with their token female co-characters if it’s still gonna result in the main character fucking the incredibly underwritten female character who’s done fuck-all the entire movie. as a woman, i don’t appreciate the role we’re given. as a lesbian, i think it’s a fucking waste of homoeroticism.

Review by saturnino ★★★★★ 4

" Será a loucura meu último vínculo com o judaísmo? " — Katja Petrowskaja, Talvez Esther .

Paris ocupa um lugar crucial no contexto da fundação do movimento sionista como palco do Caso Dreyfus, o qual se desenrolou a partir de 1894. Qual a data que a professora de Yoav destaca como sendo a mais importante de todas? 1905, quando houve a separação entre Igreja e Estado. Depois de Dreyfus. “Ninguém na França pergunta a sua religião”, ela afirma. Dreyfus é reabilitado em 1906 (mas note-se que, em última instância, Lapid está se referindo ao processo de dessecularização do próprio sionismo)

À época, os sionistas argumentavam que os judeus não estariam seguros na Europa, onde não eram reconhecidos como sujeitos nacionais. Tinham razão:…

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

I kept thinking about the third act of Clint Eastwood's Firefox when the star/director finally gets in the cockpit of the title jet and, face covered by helmet, is forced to operate it by thinking in Russian. A total negation of self. Yoav actually wants that to attempt some form of culture suicide and be reborn, but he can at best achieve the no man's land. Lapid staging is as usual very physical and willing to turn ideas into a form of action-image. Yoav's constant anger and movement and the film is one and same. I assume Synonyms won the Golden Bear and receive an overall larger acceptance than Lapid two previious feeatures because despite the very Israreli starting point…

Review by Michael Sicinski ★★½

A very strange film, Synonyms is obviously being mistaken for a good film in many quarters, so much so that it won the Golden Bear in Berlin over several more deserving entries, including Angela Schanelec's elliptical but tight-as-a-drum I Was At Home, But... and the curiously ignored Ghost Town Anthology by Denis Côté. I should note that I quite liked Lapid's two previous features. I thought Policeman was one of the most perceptive analyses of Israeli masculinity and ethnic paranoia to come along in several years, while The Kindergarten Teacher explored the nature of literary meaning from the perspective of maternal desire and the unlikely proposition of a poetic prodigy. In both cases, Lapid seemed to be asking his…

Review by Marco

that’s a real donkey dick right there

Review by Paul Elliott ★★★½ 3

Winner of the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival, Synonyms is an invigoratingly touching and heartfelt journey of personal discovery. It features a magnificent debut performance at its centre from Tom Mercier as Yoav, a cloddish Israeli man who frequently gives the impression that he’s about to break out of the frame with an enthusiastic chaotic portrayal. Director Nadav Lapid provides a different and distinctive interpretation on an extensive and continuously recurring humanitarian crisis; based on some of his own actual experiences. It has a nicely augmented storytelling style with the concept of antagonistic maleness undermined by the state of being ridiculous along with some intense critiques of the Israeli armed forces. This movie is ultimately a reflective cinematic lesson on the construction of individuality.

Review by Mike D'Angelo ★½ 4

[originally written as part of my TIFF '19 coverage]

Lapid may be my least favorite “name” director (by international-fest standards) currently working with whom I did not attend college. Have disliked all three of his acclaimed features to date, and this one—winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin—achieves whole new levels of risibility; were I to list my 10 worst scenes of the year, Synonyms would score at least three and possibly as many as five. Granted, I’m generally unenthusiastic about films that interrogate national identity (no doubt because I’ve never had to struggle with mine; see also “personal identity”), but Lapid’s sensibility rubs me the wrong way irrespective of context, and this is his most bellicose effort yet.…

Review by ben empey ★★★★

Is he a sad hot boy or a hot sad boy.........makes u think

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An Israeli in Paris

‘Synonyms’: Supremely Aggravating, at Times Astonishing

Maddening, strident, febrile, and brimming with anguish, Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms is a visceral identity crisis at 24 frames per second. This portrait of a young Israeli man fleeing his militaristic country for the erudite, lightly louche City of Light is so startling in its emotional lacerations that the film nabbed the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival . It’s less a narrative than an episodic collection of frustrating, at times astonishing, glimpses into a stressed heart. Synonyms is supremely aggravating to watch. But as a conversation piece, expect a fertile mulch.

SYNONYMS ★★★ (3/5 stars) Directed by: Nadav Lapid Written by:  Nadav Lapid, Haim Lapid Starring:  Tom Mercier, Quentin Dolmaire, Louise Chevillotte, Uria Hayik, Olivier Loustau Running time: 123 min

Sinewy loner Yoav (Tom Mercier), toting a backpack, arrives in a wintery Paris and makes his way to a grandiose but empty apartment in a chic arrondissement. After a night on its barren floor, Yoav shakes off his sleeping bag, showers, and emerges from the bathroom to realize that someone has burgled his few possessions. Naked, freezing, pounding on unresponsive doors up and down the stairwell, Yoav eventually goes back to the flat and, with a shiver, passes out in his bathtub.

Thankfully the downstairs neighbors Émile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) find him the next morning and inexplicably decide to clothe, feed, and befriend him. Émile even gives him a smartphone. They’re rich, clearly living together and presumably a couple. Disaffected lovers? Platonic roommates? Either will do. They’re indulgent and adrift, that’s what matters. Dilettante writer Émile constantly locks eyes with Yoav, charging their encounters with homoerotic longing, while concert oboist Caroline is the one who eventually ends up bedding him. Yoav is a project, an object of fascination, a source of curiosity and inspiration in their ennui-steeped lives.

And Yoav loves being with them because they’re his escape. He doesn’t want to shed his past, he wants to shred it. No more Hebrew, he insists, toting around his French dictionary like a talisman and reciting Gallic words and phrases with incantatory zeal. He insists on living in a peeling-wallpaper apartment and eating 2-euro-a-day meals. He wants to be buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Perplexingly, or perhaps because he has no other options, Yoav ends up working at the Israeli Embassy. One of the people he befriends is co-worker Yaron (Uria Hayik), an ultra-macho paranoiac who sees anti-Semitism everywhere, stridently hums the Israeli national anthem in people’s faces on the subway, and goes up to strangers just to announce, “I’m from Israel. A Jew!”

So goes Yoav’s struggle, aching to join his new French friends but constantly drawn back to his countrymen. Yoav gives writer’s-blocked Émile his traumatic war stories and painful family memories, but he also sits uneasily with life in a liberalized western country. He’s painfully aware of himself as a stereotype and a fetish object. In a moment of desperation he solicits “modeling work” and ends up in sleazy situations that treat his ethnicity and political history as a kink. He’s desperate to assimilate but wears a yellow overcoat everywhere. He’ll never blend in. And maybe he doesn’t want to.

In describing Israeli cinema, some have invoked the country’s popular Sabra. That cactus fruit is a symbol of national identity: prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside. That may be true, but Synonyms is more bittersweet, every moment of levity or tenderness undercut with an acidic aftertaste.

Lapid has said that Synonyms is semi-autobiographical, since he also came to Paris to speak only French and find a new identity by rejecting his homeland. And now Lapid is considered one of the major voices in Israeli cinema. The film is confessional, but it’s also an exorcism. It’s self-flagellation to an extreme. And, in its own way, it’s an embrace of the country and culture that tortures him, one that reframes his fidelity on his own terms.

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Stephen Garrett is the former film editor of 'Time Out New York’ and has written about the movie industry for more than 20 years. A Rotten Tomatoes certified reviewer, Garrett is also the founder of Jump Cut, a marketing company that creates trailers and posters for independent, foreign-language, and documentary films.

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SYNONYMS: Farewell To Language

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Have you ever wanted to remove your nationality like an ill-fitting item of clothing and just discard it? The protagonist of Nadav Lapid’s film Synonyms , whose story is based on experiences from Lapid’s own youth, makes a valiant effort. Winner of the top prize at the 2019 Berlinale, Synonyms is a tragicomic tale chronicling one man’s furious, frustrated attempts to become someone else.

Tired of a life dominated by hyper-masculinity and seemingly fanatical nationalism, Yoav (played by charismatic newcomer Tom Mercier ) leaves his homeland of Israel behind and even discards the Hebrew language in favor of starting a new life in France. Armed with little more than a French dictionary and a borrowed yellow peacoat, Yoav is asked by a new friend, “What will you do here?” “I do not know. I’ll be French,” he says. “That’s not enough,” the friend replies, and indeed, Yoav all too quickly learns that it is not easy to become a new person when everyone around you is only interested in what the old one has to offer them.

New Beginnings

One of the first things the audience sees on screen in Synonyms, and one of the things we see most often, is Yoav’s naked body. A disenchanted soldier, Yoav is in peak physical form. His rippling muscles – and his circumcised penis – are a constant reminder of the life he left behind in Israel, both for himself and everyone else around him. Chief among them is a bourgeois couple who come to Yoav’s rescue when he nearly freezes to death in a Paris flat after someone steals all of his belongings.

Emile ( Quentin Dolmaire ), a struggling writer living off his factory-owning family’s riches, and Caroline ( Louise Chevillotte ), an oboist in a small orchestra, are the epitome of cosmopolitan white privilege. They live comfortable lives devoted to the arts in a nice, expansive flat; in contrast, Yoav eats the same cheap pasta meal every day and takes a job as an artist’s model, where he is exploited by the photographer for his perceived exoticism, to make ends meet.

The chemistry between Emile and Yoav borders on the sensual, with both men seeing and prizing in each other everything the other is not. Emile is fascinated by Yoav’s stories of life in the military, rife with testosterone and unlike anything he has experienced; at one point, Yoav offers Emile his stories to use as writing material, before eventually reclaiming them for himself. As Caroline later tells Yoav about Emile, “With you and all your stories, he feels banal.” In the meantime, Caroline chooses to take advantage of Yoav in a much different way, and the two embark on an affair. However much Emile knows about it, he doesn’t seem to mind, even encouraging Caroline to marry Yoav so he can stay in France. However, once the union occurs, both Emile and Caroline lose interest in Yoav; no longer existing in a perpetual state of flux, he is no longer a source of excitement for them.

Lost, Not Found

Whether it be through the dramatic stories he tells or the physical pleasure he gives, it is clear that neither Emile nor Caroline is capable of seeing Yoav as more than a momentary diversion from the comfortable monotony of their lives. His past trauma is perceived by them as a novelty, something to be entertained by and inspired by but not to really take seriously. At one point, Emile makes the same simple pasta dish that Yoav survives on for Caroline at home, but he ends up adding capers to it; Emile is so privileged that he is incapable of even properly playacting at the poverty that defines Yoav’s existence in Paris.

Yoav’s struggle to leave his past behind is made extra challenging in that no one else will let him. Emile wants him to keep sharing his stories of military life, while the photographer who hires him for a sexually explicit shoot insists that he yell and moan in Hebrew because he likes the sound, despite not understanding any of the words. Meanwhile, a fellow Israeli in Paris, Yaron ( Uria Hayik ), is the polar opposite of Yoav; while Yoav wants to submerge his national identity and never speak Hebrew again, Yaron lives for being Israeli and goes so far as to aggressively sing Hebrew songs in the faces of Paris commuters. Obsessed with defending fellow Jews from right-wing terrorism, Yaron is the human embodiment of the toxic masculinity and fervent nationalism Yoav wants to permanently abandon.

Fraying Roots

In Yoav’s French citizenship classes, the teacher boasts that no one in France talks about their religion, but where does that leave you when your religion has been the core of your identity your entire life? Yoav might not want anything to do with Israel, but he is also incapable of becoming truly French, no matter how seriously he takes his various misguided attempts at assimilation. When Yoav asks to reclaim his stories from Emile, it isn’t because he wants them back — it’s because after being rejected by the French, those stories of his past are all he has left to define himself.

Co-written by Lapid and his father, Haim Lapid , what S ynonyms lacks in a traditional plot it makes up for in richly authentic emotion. Lapid leaves the wounds of his youth open and raw on screen, and the lingering pain infuses every frame. The conflicts at the heart of Synonyms are heavy ones, but they are balanced with moments of comic absurdity that highlight the lighter side of the film’s culture clashes. Filled to the brim with furious and frenetic energy, Synonyms is defined by its central character; even the camera work, rife with constant movement, echoes Yoav’s inherent chaos as he struggles and fails to find a clear path forward into a new future. Mercier , a former judoka turned dancer, bears a striking physical resemblance to Tom Hardy and, like that actor, has a keen ability to plumb the depths of masculine emotion. It’s impossible to tear your eyes away from him when he is on screen, and not just because he is beautiful to look at; he has the natural magnetism of an old Hollywood star.

Dolmaire , whose elegant cheekbones and delicate stature make Emile a perfect contrast to Yoav physically as well as culturally, is Mercier’s ideal opposite number, and their instant chemistry is deliciously palpable; indeed, their attraction to each other is so intense that for most of the film I assumed Yoav would fall into bed with Emile, not Caroline. The inevitable devolution of their relationship is as tragic as any broken romance, if not more so because of its larger implications. Blood is thicker than water, Lapid seems to be telling us, and even if you try your damnedest to believe otherwise, others will not let you forget it.

Synonyms: Conclusion

Putting down roots in a new place is never easy, but trying to become a new person is even harder. Yet even if you’ve never attempted either of these things, the conflicts at the heart of Synonyms will resonate deeply, thanks to Lapid’s deeply personal storytelling and Mercier’s fiery performance.

What do you think? What are your experiences with assimilating to a new culture? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Synonyms is currently available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming services in the U.S. You can find more international release dates here .

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Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Film School Rejects, Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture, Bitch Flicks, TV Fanatic, and Just Press Play. When not watching, making, or writing about films, she can usually be found on Twitter obsessing over soccer, BTS, and her cat.

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Synonyms latches onto third-rail issues with thrilling audacity -- and taps into an energy that proves as discomfiting as it is infectious.

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‘Synonyms’ Review: How Do You Say ‘Enraged Expatriate’ in French?

By David Fear

Yoav (Tom Mercier) is speed-walking down the rainy streets of Paris, past cafes and cars and people reading newspapers; he’s moving so fast that the camera can barely keep up with him. Once he finds the apartment he’s going to crash in —and the key to the front door under the mat — the twentysomething Israeli makes himself at home. Halfway through some interrupted mid-shower onanism, Yoav runs into the bare living room, slips on the hardwood floor…and finds that everything from his clothes to his sleeping bag has just been stolen. He’s penniless, possession-less and all alone. Welcome to France.

The next morning, his downstairs neighbors Emile (Quentin Dolemaire), an aspiring novelist, and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), a professional musician, find Yoav naked, shivering and unconscious in his flat. These bougie-bohemian millennials give him clothes, cash, a cell phone and a mustard-colored overcoat. He hits the streets, haunting bookstores for French dictionaries and unleashing a barrage of adjectives on everyone he meets, all the better to take his new, adopted language out for a spin. Yoav is relocating to the City of Lights because he a massive bone to pick with the nation of his birth. Specifically, he’s not crazy about the military mindset that this ex-soldier thinks has curdled the country’s culture at large and scarred him specifically. “I moved to France to flee Israel,” Yoav tells Emile, because the latter is “a state that is nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant, detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted….” “No country is all that at once,” the writer replies. “ Choose. ”

Slightly autobiographical — and definitely the sort of full-throated cri de couer that comes from a deep well of rage — this award-winning portrait of an ex-pat from Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid conjures the freedom of beginning a new life when you’re young, handsome and able to consist on little more than spaghetti, tomato sauce and chips. (Yoav can recite the exact measurements of the meal and prices of its ingredients at will. He’s like a walking encyclopedia of Franco-ephemera.) Plus it benefits from having a lead that leans into his role 110-percent; you’d be hard-pressed to think of a more perfect introduction to Mercier’s brooding, brutish screen presence. With his long pugilist’s mug and lean, muscular physique, this Israeli dancer and former Judo champion looks so much like a Breathless -era Jean-Paul Belmondo at times that you keep waiting for him to drag his thumb across his lip. He’s a dynamic performer even when he’s just standing there, eyes nervously darting back and forth. Give the 26-year-old actor the chance to flail around to music in his room, or seduce a clubgoer with a loaf of bread, or turn a skeezy model shoot into a cringe-comic set piece, and watch how Mercier gives off serious movie-star wattage. It’s a showcase.

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But Synonyms is also a critique of a country — hint: not France — that suggests a citizenship weaned on perpetual life-during-wartime alert might be slightly traumatized. Lapid has taken his homeland to task before, via cop procedurals (the criminally underseen Policeman ) and tweaked movie-of-the-week–style melodramas ( The Kindergarten Teacher ). This poisson -out-of-water character study feels a lot more personal; it’s also a lot more pointed. You do not put in a character like Uria Hayik’s Jewish zealot, who aggressively sings “Hatikvah” in an Arabic man’s face on the metro, or include a scene at Israel’s embassy in France that echoes encounters at West Bank checkpoints, without wanting to ruffle an aviary’s worth of feathers. It’s an angry movie. A smart-ass might also proceed to call Synonyms enraged, antagonistic, furious, apoplectic and seething, but luckily for you, we would not stoop to something that gimmicky.

Yet it’s an exhilarating and profoundly sorrowful work as well, especially once Yoav begins to realize that you can take the man out of his home country but you can’t take the home country out of the man. Nationalism is part of our protagonist’s DNA whether he cares to admit or not, and to see him lead his fellow naturalization classmates in a manic “La Marseillaise” or berate an orchestra for not being passionate enough is to recognize that you’re observing a tragedy. The movie ends with a scene of a man throwing himself violently against a closed door, unable to enter and equally unable to move forward. Plus ça change ….

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Shantay, you stay.

In Montreal, Simon (Théodore Pellerin) pursues a career as a drag queen and contends with two thorny relationships: a destructive crush on a fellow performer and a reunion with his absentee mother.

“Solo” is a subtle snapshot into a gay man’s profound yet familiar upheavals. Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.

Inspirational, not necessarily insightful

A man who endured a traumatic childhood during the Chinese Cultural Revolution becomes a world-renowned eye surgeon in this fictionalized account of the life of Dr. Ming Wang.

As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.

Compiled by Kellina Moore .

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Julio Torres’ ‘Fantasmas’ Will Shock and Delight You

The latest project from the performer is bizarre, weird, odd, and every other synonym for “strange.” It’s also absolutely irresistible.

Coleman Spilde

Entertainment Critic

While I’d never root for a movie to be delayed, especially not because of a labor strike, I think it may have been divine intervention in the case of Julio Torres’ fantastic directorial debut Problemista . The film was originally scheduled for a theatrical release last August, but was delayed until March of this year due to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. That postponement might’ve meant that people had to wait to be welcomed into Torres’ world of just-left-of-reality oddities, but it also means that the film will be fresh in their minds when watching his bold new series Fantasmas , which begins airing June 7 on HBO and streams on Max.

Fantasmas finds Torres once again boring into the minutiae of mundane, everyday activities and objects, this time to create a version of New York City where nothing is ever quite as it seems. (Honestly? Kind of exactly like the real NYC, only with more hazy clouds of green mist.) While the writer and comedian has brought his microscopic evaluations to other TV shows , past comedy specials , and Saturday Night Live sketches , he’s never quite had the right platform to go full-tilt gaga. Movies are a bigger financial risk than television, where you can appeal to the hidden peculiarities of viewers within the safety of their own homes.

And appeal he does. Something is just a little bit off about Fantasmas from the start, until what appears to be a one-off comedic aside about an old, Alf -like sitcom keeps going and going, making it apparent what this series really is. Torres’ show is a collection of brilliantly made, narratively cohesive vignettes where no detail is too small to perfect. Surprise guest stars pop up everywhere, game to be as nutty as Torres wants them to be—even the way Tilda Swinton cameos will shock and delight you, and she’s Tilda Swinton! For fans of art-forward comedy, who deride the unremarkableness of daily life but are fatigued by the overdone, self-deprecating humor of traditional series, Torres’ latest project is a gift. Fantasmas is special because it feels both fresh and familiar, making it one the very best new shows of the year.

Torres plays a version of himself in the series, and the trouble begins for this Julio from the very start. His dreams are plagued by visions of having to prove his identity by getting a government ID, one of the two running jokes that coil through each episode of Fantasmas . (The other is the search for a diamond-encrusted earring shaped like an oyster, which Julio believes will give him the clarity in life that he’s seeking.) Julio’s detest of government protocol makes its way over to this show from Problemista , which saw Torres rallying against the immigration system in ways that were similarly abstract, but still palatable for the average moviegoer. Fantasmas is a bit different. If you’re put off by its peculiarity, that’s by design. All you’re asked to do is lean into it, in the same way that Torres does writing and directing each of the first season’s six episodes.

That aforementioned Alf aside occurs just four minutes into the series premiere, when Julio meets one of Fantasmas ’ hysterical recurring characters, a rideshare driver named Chester (Tomas Matos). Chester insists that Julio not touch the TV on the back of the seat, it must be playing Melf at all times. Suddenly, we’re thrust into an episode of Melf , which initially appears to be the ideal family sitcom (with Paul Dano in a typically bizarre role), until a shocking narrative turn takes the plot awry. Spoiling where the vignette goes would be to spoil the jaw-dropping fun, but just know that once you think it has gone as far as it will go, the scene goes even further. Not in any way that is violent, sexual, or grotesque, but in a way that is uniquely of Torres’ mind.

Paul Dano in Fantasmas .

Atsushi Nishijima/HBO

Watching Fantasmas often feels like hanging out with your friends and taking too large of an edible , sending you and your besties down a wormhole of THC-induced tangents. At times, you can’t believe what you’re seeing simply because episodes feel like such a treat to indulge in, like someone is scratching that part of your brain that craves creative release. The mind-melting depths that Torres can go to are nothing short of brilliant, but it’s the writer-director’s ease of getting to those places that is really impressive. Every episode, with its faultless details and spirited pacing, seems to flow so naturally from Torres’ mind. None of this seems manufactured or hamfisted, even though Fantasmas is entirely the product of someone who sees the world in a way that many of us can’t until we’re shown how.

What’s even more marvelous is that Torres is building his own creative world, where the connections between his different projects make them feel even more rich and lively. An adorable little robot assistant named Bibo (Joe Rumrill) migrates to this show from the end of Problemista , in an updated model that is just as inefficient here as it was in the film. And then there’s Torres’ love of casting his friends and close creative collaborators, like the pitch-perfect Martine Gutierrez, who had a laugh-out-loud bit part as a snooty gallerist in Problemista. In Fantasmas , Gutierrez plays Julio’s softly-spoken pin-up girl agent, who is actually a performance artist who played the part of an agent so long that she forgot she was acting. It’s those kinds of little particulars that make this show such a joy to watch as the rewards of this character writing are reaped as the series goes on.

Aidy Bryant.

There are too many guest appearances to count in Fantasmas , and none of them are as you might imagine. Aidy Bryant plays a woman who sells designer dresses for a certain household item; John Early voices a rodent; Kate Berlant pops up at a theme park run by an e-commerce brand; Evan Mock does what he does best and looks pretty on camera. There is someone and something here for everyone, but to give away anything too precise would rob you of all of the fun and laughter that Fantasmas has in store for you.

Amongst all the surprises, Torres weaves in biting commentary on things like immigration, healthcare, television executives who only care about money, and corporate banking. There’s a real sharpness here, despite the series being filmed with a gorgeous, hazy grain. The show is about as fantastical as Torres’ comedy has gotten, and yet, it’s still completely approachable. It takes a hefty bout of confidence for a writer to craft something so uncompromising and strange, and that courage is contagious. If Julio Torres can produce some of his most compelling work by looking around to make the abnormal normal and vice versa, nothing is stopping any of us from peering at the world with the same ectoplasm-green lenses.

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